A New "Iron Curtain" Along Gaza

Metal slabs lay on the ground on the Egyptian side of the border where Egypt is installing a barrier meant to stop smuggling goods and weapons to Gaza, as seen from Rafah in the Gaza Strip, Monday, Jan. 4, 2010.

(Credit: AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

Heavy machinery operates day and night, breaking the usual silence of the borderland near Gaza, where Egypt is building a massive iron wall, approximately 30 yards into the Earth.

The controversial move — intended to shut down smuggling tunnels which are the Strip's only remaining lifeline — would further tighten a 3-year-long Israeli blockade, which has turned the poverty-stricken enclave into what critics call "the biggest prison on Earth."

 

The tunnels are used for smuggling everything from food, medicine and household goods, to vehicles, even livestock.

 

But Israel says they're also used for bringing weapons into the Palestinian-controlled territory.

The installation of the 10-kilometer-long, 30-meter-deep barrier started physically last November, and it may be months before it is finished. Sealing the underground links would further throttle the Gazan economy and finally cut off Gaza's main link to the outside world.

Egyptian officials initially would not discuss the $500 million project, and still decline to provide details.

Hundreds of people have gathered outside the Egyptian embassies in Amman, Beirut, Yemen and elsewhere over the past few months to condemn the Egyptian decision. Some burned photos of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak with a Star of David stamped on his forehead.

A few months ago, violent protests along the border against the wall project left one Egyptian dead and several Palestinians injured.

In recent weeks, as opposition to the wall mounted, Egypt's leaders have struck a defiant tone.

 

"Egyptian borders are sacred and no Egyptian allows any violations in one way or another," the government's Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has said.

 

Egypt's upper house of parliament, the Shura Council, issued a document endorsing the government's security measures in northern Sinai and along the border.

Several Egyptian newspapers devoted editorials to the danger facing Egypt from the arms smuggling and the tunnels, and stressed Egypt's right to defend its sovereignty and security.

Egypt is wary of Hamas (the Palestinian resistance group that controls Gaza and which is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and the European Union) because it is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the long-established trans-national movement that supports the creation of an Islamic state in Egypt and which has long been a thorn in the flesh of President Mubarak.

 

Two years ago, Hamas militants cut down a metal border wall that had been erected by Israel, enabling tens of thousands of Gazans to pour into Egypt until the border was resealed.

Though described as a policy of "collective punishment" by many aid organizations, Egypt's decision to build the steel wall has been defended as its sovereign right by the leader of the Palestinian Fatah movement, President Mahmoud Abbas — who, ironically, also condemned Israel's "apartheid wall" in the West Bank, urging the international community to tear it down.

In fact, the Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Karen Abu Zayd, lamented the Egyptian decision, saying the wall discredits Egypt and serves only Israel.

BBC News reported last year that the wall was designed and constructed in pieces by American engineers. U.S. officials told the BBC they are not involved in its building.

"It is even stronger than Barlev Line, which Israel had built on the East side of Suez Canal before the October 1973 war," she has said in a lecture at the American University in Cairo.

 

But many Palestinians who spoke to CBS News (and who declined to give their names) have raised the possibility that the smugglers might simply dig deeper, going below the underground wall in hopes of continuing the flow of goods into the poverty-stricken Gaza Strip.

Dividing Lines

After the Palestinian resistance group Hamas (considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and the European Union) swept democratically-held legislative elections in 2006 against President Abbas' Western-backed Fatah movement, and later seized control of the Gaza Strip in a pre-emptive coup the following year, Egypt and Israel sealed border crossings with the territory, restricting entry of people and goods into Gaza.

Affected are 1.5 million men, women and children, most of whom are not Hamas activists.

 

Following Israel's December 2008 attacks on Gaza (which it said were meant to stop Hamas and other militant groups from firing rockets into its territory, restrictions on construction materials allowed into the region have prevented Palestinians from being able to rebuild thousands of houses destroyed in the war.

Cairo was criticized before, during and after the last war for allegedly providing diplomatic cover for Israel.

Egypt opens a border crossing once every two months for up to three days to allow Palestinians to cross into Gaza, in the divided city of Rafah. (The city has been bisected by the border since 1982, when Egypt accepted the return of Sinai from Israel but declined to take back Gaza as well.) Only people with special permits are allowed into the Egyptian territories.

The Israeli government recently said it would stop a convoy of cargo and passenger ships filled with supplies and headed to Gaza. The eight ships, organized by an international group called the Free Gaza Movement, are carrying about 10,000 tons of cargo, including cement, medical equipment and school supplies.

Now, Egyptian troops in four armored personnel carriers with mounted machine guns guard the building site some 80 meters away from the borderline, where large cranes, spiral drillers, trucks loaded with sand, excavation equipment and many workers have been brought to install the super-strength anti-bomb steel harbor dock.

 

With the rise of the Egyptian wall, rumors are running wild.

 

The wall, dubbed the "wall of shame," would be "rigged with sensors and pressurized hoses to flood tunnels with seawater," said a 24-year-old Palestinian woman on line at the border, on her way back home to Gaza.

The woman, whom I called Samira (not her real name, due to her fears to reveal it due to the sensitivity of the issue), refused to tell CBS News how she had managed to get a special permit so that her identity would not be known.

 

"This is genocide. Without the tunnels, Gazan people will die," she said while doing her paperwork at the border. "That will cause a lack of basic products, fuel and raw materials, which will in turn lead to a rise in prices.

 

A mother of three children, Samira was carrying almost whatever she could manage to buy in Egypt: cookies, chocolate bars, cheeses, shampoos, clothes, kitchen ware appliances, cigarettes, toys and medication, not to mention the loads she had to cart from her acquaintances in Cairo to bring them in to Gaza.

 

She said people could get the basic foods in Gaza, a 140-mile rectangle on the Mediterranean, but at three times the cost.

During her week-long trip outside Gaza, her first in four years, green-eyed Samira received tens of text messages from her relatives and friends alike.

 

"If there is no bother, will you get me Fatafeet magazine?" her mother asks in one SMS. "I beg you, honey, please get me some cereals for my kid, he is dying to have them with milk," reads another from a friend.

 

At the top of the list were pastas, which are no longer available in Gaza.

"This should help until I can travel next year, hopefully," Samira said. She told CBS News that approximately 5,000 are applying to cross over, and she would need to wait her turn.

"Even if their aim was not to buy food but they may simply need to enjoy the air of freedom," Samira said, waving a goodbye with a big smile on her face.

 

Written by CBS News' George Baghdadi reporting from Rafah, Egypt.

 

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